Have Titans learned from Caleb Williams, Bryce Young issues?

NASHVILLE — The No. 1 pick looked exasperated.

Cam Ward and his Tennessee Titans offense had just completed a dud of an Aug. 3 practice while coach Brian Callahan, standing directly behind his players during sprints, blared his disappointment with profanity. The day’s errant throws, missed protections and dropped passes were all on Callahan’s mind.

Minutes later, as assistant coaches and players scattered, Ward could be seen locked into conversation with Callahan at midfield, sometimes motioning with his hands in animated fashion. The quarterback and coach discussed the root causes of the day’s miscues for about 10 minutes.

The struggles weren’t solely on the 23-year-old Ward, who had been productive the previous two days. Callahan had promised that Ward’s success “isn’t always going to be linear,” and on this day, the line of progress had strayed a distance from its intended target.

“He knows he doesn’t have all the answers,” Callahan said a day earlier. “He does have opinions, too, and he’s not afraid to voice them. Which is good. That’s healthy.”

But developing a No. 1 pick hardly promotes good health for the coaches charged with the task. Frank Reich, appointed to prepare a plan for 2023 No. 1 pick Bryce Young, was fired 11 games into his lone season with the Carolina Panthers. One season later, third-year coach Matt Eberflus lasted 12 games with No. 1 pick Caleb Williams, the player with the “generational talent” label who was supposed to be the antidote to decades of quarterback maladies in Chicago.

Callahan must hope he’s not the third straight coach of a No. 1 pick to get fired. After going a league-worst 3-14 in his first season, Callahan must provide evidence that he has the Titans headed in the right direction. He’ll have to do so with a patchwork roster put together by an organization with relatively fresh front office leadership, and while performing what has traditionally been one of the NFL’s most difficult feats — winning with a rookie quarterback.

Per ESPN Research, teams that start rookie QBs are a combined 431-655-2 (.397) in the NFL’s 32-team era (since 2002), though No. 2 pick Jayden Daniels and the Commanders showed this past season that immediate turnarounds can happen. The list of No. 1 selections with winning records (minimum three starts) as rookie QBs in the common draft era is one name long: Andrew Luck (2012).

“I think the old adage is that pressure is a bit of privilege,” Callahan said. “You get a chance to work with a great player when you pick him at the top of the draft. If it so happens to be a quarterback, that doesn’t change anything for me, how I go about my job, what I do on a day-to-day basis, what I believe about the development of the position. None of that changes. It’s exciting. It’s what you hope for.”

Yet the degree of difficulty in steering the franchise back toward contender status is high. And for Callahan, the dubious past of top-pick rookies will be prologue.

TWO SUMMERS REMOVED from his lone training camp with Bryce Young, Reich is reflective. Now the interim coach at Stanford, he recalls a feeling of optimism around the start of the fleeting Reich/Young era.

“I felt the challenge of this [taking over a team with problems to solve], but I wasn’t worried about it and we felt it’s going to work out,” Reich told ESPN. “We’ve got good coaches; Bryce is a good player. We have good players and we will get draft picks right. [Owner David] Tepper will invest in the team and make the moves.”

But Reich acknowledged the Panthers launched the Young experiment with roster challenges, thanks in part to the pre-2023 draft trade that yielded the Panthers the No. 1 pick and the right to draft Young. Carolina gave up veteran receiver DJ Moore in that deal and first- and second-round picks in 2023 and 2024.

Carolina had undergone significant change before the 2023 season, with a major move in each of the previous three years — hiring coach Matt Rhule in January 2020, hiring general manager Scott Fitterer in January 2021 and firing Rhule in October 2022. The roster was not a finished product even before the trade, meaning Young’s rookie year would feature the lack of a true No. 1 receiving threat or a stellar run game.

As Reich saw it, the transition to position Young for success was “going to take longer,” he said. But while the lack of top-end talent might have been a known quantity, the absence of a shared vision among the coaching staff proved harder to predict.

Reich named Thomas Brown, an ascending coach from the Los Angeles Rams‘ coaching tree, as his offensive coordinator. The plan was to blend Sean McVay’s Rams system with Reich’s offensive background and philosophy. But Reich was calling the plays for Young, and said he realized at some point between the spring and training camp that using the McVay terminology while calling the plays himself “wasn’t going to feel right,” so he made tweaks.

One team source felt Reich never “truly bought in” to Brown’s plan of attack; another believed the staff featured “too many cooks in the kitchen” preparing Young, who was 1-9 in 10 starts and ranked 29th in the NFL in Total QBR with a rating of 32.0 when Reich was fired Nov. 27. It didn’t get better afterward, as Young ended up 2-14 as the starter and finished second to last among QBR qualifiers.

“I don’t know if that ultimately ended up being fair to Bryce,” Reich said of the blending of systems. “It wasn’t because of Thomas. He brought an ‘A’ game every day. Myself and the other guys that were with me, we were doing the same thing. In many respects, we brought it together the best we could. It probably made it a little more difficult for Bryce.”

While Tennessee has some of the same roster deficiencies experienced by the 2023 Panthers — ESPN’s roster rankings listed the Titans 28th out of 32 teams this past month — Ward will have more continuity in the coaching staff than did Young. Callahan will call the plays for a second straight year, and offensive coordinator Nick Holz and quarterbacks coach Bo Hardegree are also holdovers.

After making three college stops, Ward said he is yearning for continuity.

“I’m trying to play as long as I can for Tennessee with those three guys at the helm,” he said. “They continuously give me feedback even when I don’t want feedback. I’m blessed to have those three in the same room with me. They push me to be great and I want to be one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL. It would unlock everything.”

But Callahan’s staff will also have to put Ward in position to succeed in a way Carolina failed to do with Young.

“There’s a saying that organizations fail quarterbacks more than quarterbacks fail themselves,” Titans assistant general manager Dave Zeigler said.

One Panthers team source said Young developed poor habits with footwork, sloppy fundamentals and overall preparation in his season with Reich’s staff. Young averaged around 33 passing attempts per game behind a bad offensive line that surrendered 62 sacks, making Young the second-most sacked quarterback in the league in 2023.

Reich said now he felt Young had the mental toughness to handle criticism, and even though he corrected mistakes, Reich admitted “[Young] was getting beat up, so I wasn’t going to be too critical of him.” As a former NFL quarterback, Reich said he understood the sometimes fragile psychology of the position. It’s something Callahan and his staff will have to consider as it determines how hard to push with Ward.

“Learning the pro game … defenses are a lot better. There are no easy games,” Reich said. “You have to earn every completion, every first down, every touchdown, every win. The ultimate formula for success is great quarterback play and a great defense. But I also do think if you have a legit No. 1 guy who is special, I think early on you want a couple of weapons [that] can show how he’s special. And obviously you have to protect him.”

ON A RECENT off day, Callahan was concluding a task around 4 p.m. when Ward walked into his office within the Titans facility, asking to run through the next day’s practice scripts so he could properly communicate with the rest of the offense.

“The work ethic thing is legit,” Callahan said of a quarterback who went from being a lightly recruited FCS player at Incarnate Word to a Heisman Trophy finalist at Miami and the eventual No. 1 pick. Ward’s communicative relationship with his coaching staff is another mark in his favor, one that might help him avoid the type of trying saga Williams experienced as a rookie in Chicago.

“Chicago is the place quarterbacks go to die,” Carl Williams, Caleb’s father, told ESPN’s Seth Wickersham, who wrote in his new book “American Kings” that Caleb privately questioned whether he wanted to play for former Bears offensive coordinator Shane Waldron.

A source with direct knowledge of Williams’ predraft process said Williams’ fact-finding mission about his new team soured him on Waldron, who was the Seattle Seahawks‘ offensive coordinator before joining Chicago in January 2024. Among chief concerns, the source said, were whether personalities would jell and how Waldron would use him.

“Whoever he talked to in Seattle didn’t give him the best reviews,” the source said. Waldron, now on Jacksonville‘s staff, declined to comment for this story.

Like Brown, Waldron came from the Rams’ coaching tree, which prioritizes the run game and play-action, considered good for young quarterbacks. Also on Chicago’s 2024 staff was Brown, hired after Reich’s staff in Carolina was dismantled.

But the Bears found out early that the combination of Waldron and Eberflus wouldn’t be strong enough for Williams. (Eberflus, now the Dallas Cowboys‘ defensive coordinator, was not made available for this story.) As one team source put it, the staff projected the feeling of, “We will figure it out, he’s a rookie,” whereas more direct tutelage on the basics of quarterback play was needed. It’s also notable that the Bears did not have another veteran on the roster for Williams to lean on, which multiple sources found problematic.

Williams told Wickersham he had to watch game film alone, without guidance from the staff, which rankled some members of Eberflus’ staff who saw accountability issues in that statement. But rookie seasons are about survival, and quarterbacks need support systems to tread water.

During the season, Williams began struggling with some of the basics such as finding easy completions over the middle of the field or smoothly getting from the playcall in the huddle to the line of scrimmage without hiccups. To be sure, many rookies struggle with this, and not every rookie posts a respectable 3,541 yards, 20 touchdowns and six interceptions in their first season.

Regardless, Williams’ transition from Lincoln Riley’s shotgun-heavy system at USC was considered a major undertaking in NFL circles, and one that took Arizona’s Kyler Murray, also a former No. 1 pick, time to master. As an AFC executive noted, Williams’ tendency to make plays off raw talent instead of playing on time and within the structure of an offense raised concerns about his ability to succeed in Year 1.

“This was not going to go well with the OC, and I think they realized that early,” the executive said. “I just thought [Williams] never saw the field well and it showed.”

The Titans, conversely, have been intentional about tailoring the offense to the things Ward does best, explicitly citing Washington’s plan for Daniels as a template for how to build Ward’s confidence early.

“It’s been the same route concepts,” Ward noted after rookie minicamp about the similarities with the Miami offense. “A little bit different footwork, but that all comes with time and preparation. I got two good coaches who continue to motivate me every day in coach Callahan and coach Bo, so I think I got a good group of guys around me to help.”

In Chicago, Eberflus fired Waldron 17 days before he himself was fired. The Bears’ offseason charge was about finding a coach who could optimize Williams’ skills, eventually landing on one of the NFL’s hottest offensive coordinator in the Lions‘ Ben Johnson.

Bears general manager Ryan Poles acknowledged the philosophical changes under Johnson in a diplomatic way. Poles classified Johnson’s coaching of Williams as “relentless, especially with fine-tuning the nuances of the position.”

“Before it was a little bit more, ‘How can we just bridge him to this first year?'” Poles said. “This [season] is like, ‘We have to set your foundation, and you don’t really have a choice.’ It’s tough love, and I think he was looking for that.”

Poles said he learned a lot about the potential pitfalls of working with a rookie quarterback, wisdom Callahan and the Titans might want to consider.

“It’s definitely case by case and what the foundation is,” Poles said. “I would say that relationship [is key], that compatibility piece between quarterback and coach, the balance between, ‘All right, we’re going to bend to the rookie and make him feel comfortable’ versus, ‘There are some hard things we have to get through and you’re going to be uncomfortable but we’re going to press you through that.'”

CALLAHAN DOESN’T HAVE to look far for a No. 1 quarterback success story to guide him through Ward’s rookie travails — he lived one. Callahan was the Cincinnati Bengals‘ offensive coordinator during Joe Burrow’s rookie season in 2020. He said he has helped prepare for Ward’s rookie acclimation process by rewatching clips of his meetings with Burrow that year, which are still accessible via Zoom, a by-product of the prevaccine COVID-19 era.

Burrow proved to be a relatively fast learner. But the NFL game challenges everyone, and while Burrow had a promising rookie season before a season-ending knee injury 10 games in, he also won only twice in 10 starts. Burrow had to learn how to handle defensive pressure in the pocket, as well as the nuances of timing, extending plays, the speed of the NFL and complexities of protection, which Callahan threw at his pupil “as fast as possible,” he said.

Callahan is doing the same thing with Ward, who he said also has a high mental capacity for the game. He also believes Ward, like Burrow, has an outstanding ability to process quickly.

“Certain things you have to do as an NFL quarterback,” Callahan said. “It’s very different from college — you have to figure out where the blind spots are. Where are those spots, and how do you help introduce what that looks like?”

Callahan saw some of those spots in that rough practice earlier this month, when the tasks included almost exclusively third-down work and the defense disguised blitzes to fluster the quarterback. That day was ugly, but on the next one, Ward responded with a strong performance.

One reason why: Ward’s otherworldly drive. Callahan said Ward is in the building every day between 4:30 and 5 a.m. and brings teammates with him. The weight room is now packed early, which is a change from this past year and one for which Ward has been a catalyst. Former All-Pro wide receiver Tyler Lockett said he signed with Tennessee because “I wanted to play with Cam,” and revels in the chance to connect on improvisational plays from out of the pocket, an area in which both players excel.

“It’s the second play,” Lockett said about what he learned after years of running off script plays with Russell Wilson in Seattle. “There’s the first play, which is everyone running their routes and the quarterback going through his progressions, and the second play is to be able to run and get open and having an awareness of where everybody is.”

Ward’s ability to process information is “pretty unique,” Callahan said, who believes that making quick decisions from the pocket will allow Ward to make plays naturally.

“You want Cam to grow into his own and be his own style of player,” Callahan said.

While developing that style, the Titans must also find ways to win games with a roster that’s modestly improved — in addition to selecting two first-round offensive linemen, the Titans have also acquired left tackle Dan Moore Jr., wide receiver Calvin Ridley and running back Tony Pollard in the past two free agent cycles — but are unlikely to contend for a championship in 2025.

Deepening the intrigue is an organization that has faced its share of turmoil after firing a key figurehead in three straight cycles — general manager Jon Robinson in December 2022, coach Mike Vrabel in January 2024 and Robinson’s replacement, Ran Carthon, in January 2025.

Of late, the organizational timeline resembles scribbles in a child’s coloring book. The franchise hired Chad Brinker from Green Bay as assistant general manager in February 2023, a month after hiring Carthon as GM, only to promote both figures after the 2023 season, naming Brinker the president of football operations and Carthon a vice president.

A year after that, Tennessee owner Amy Adams Strunk fired Carthon on Jan. 7, then turned to Brinker to fix the problem. Brinker handpicked Mike Borgonzi, a longtime Kansas City lieutenant, as GM. Both Borgonzi and Brinker come from places that value longevity, which requires patience.

There was consideration given to completely cleaning house and sending Callahan on his way along with Carthon, multiple Titans sources confirmed. Callahan and Carthon had a close relationship, and having the No. 1 pick gave Tennessee an opportunity to bring in a new general manager, coach and rookie quarterback at the same time.

But the front office took an honest look at the talent on the roster and factored that into Callahan’s record in his first season. The front office didn’t lose sight of Callahan being one of the league’s in-demand coaching candidates when the Titans hired him.

“We wanted to give him that opportunity to grow as a head football coach,” Brinker told ESPN. “We felt like another year to grow into that and we’re going to need to see that growth. We believe in Brian, and we think he’s going to get there. So that’s why he was retained.”

Brinker’s role in the team’s bigger picture can’t be overstated. In simplest form: Brinker’s job is to plan for the Titans’ next 10 years, Borgonzi for the next three to five years and Callahan for the next game.

“Our structure is unique, but it’s not abnormal,” Brinker said. “The way we’re structured is that Amy wanted a football executive. So, I report to Amy. Mike reports to me, and the head coach reports to Mike. If there is some sort of dispute that we just can’t resolve, we’re going to get in the room, we’re going to talk about it and we’re going to work through it together.”

The sense on the ground during Tennessee’s training camp is that Callahan is well-supported and that modest progress could be enough to keep his job beyond this year, depending on how that progress looks. “He was in an incredibly tough situation last year,” a team source said. And team officials have noticed Callahan has shown more vocal leadership in Year 2.

The objective for the team is clear: Just improve.

“I’m really not big into expectations. I want to see growth,” Borgonzi said. “I want to see competition and discipline and start to come together as a team. Are we getting better?”

All of this is easy to say in August. November and December are when an owner’s patience will be tested if the season has taken a disappointing turn and fan apathy is cutting into the bottom line. The pressure is also on Ward, but he’s confident he’ll be unfazed by it — and believes his coach will be right there in his corner.

“[Callahan is] going to put me in the best position to succeed,” Ward said.

FOR EVERY CAUTIONARY tale with young quarterbacks, there’s a touted pick outperforming expectations. The most recent success stories came from the draft’s No. 2 spot, with Houston‘s C.J. Stroud (2023) and Daniels posting back-to-back banner rookie years. That both were drafted behind Young and Williams produces two reminders: That finding franchise pillars is an inexact process, and that it can be done.

Tennessee is acutely aware of both realities, hoping Ward’s presence can galvanize a team and elevate the play around him.

But that’s a lot to ask, too.

“You don’t want to put wins and losses on a rookie quarterback, but obviously we want to win football games,” Callahan said. “When you look back at success or failure of a rookie year, you look at Jayden Daniels’ year and say that was a success. You look at Caleb and say that probably wasn’t. But it’s all based on record. Well, Caleb did a lot of good things, just like Jayden did. The teams are different. It’s hard to compare those guys. But you see the standards of what it’s supposed to look like.”

Callahan revels in the chance to work with what he hopes is NFL greatness. Developing a talented quarterback from the ground up is “exciting,” he said, and “what you hope for.”

Rival teams see work to be done. One executive with an NFL team who has scouted Ward this preseason said he’s a “very gifted thrower” but “has a tough time reading defenses vs. pressure” and “likes to hold the ball” — similar criticisms that Williams faced in Chicago this past year. The difference is that Williams is widely considered the better passer.

Callahan’s plan is to be consistent with Ward through triumph and turbulence, knowing both labels can be fleeting. Sometimes, the positive is a by-product of teammates making the quarterback look good with a brilliant block or a receiver taking a screen pass 60 yards. Sometimes, an interception isn’t the quarterback’s fault.

Ward seems comfortable with the accountability required in all of it. Ward’s numbers in his second preseason start were pedestrian (2-of-7, 42 yards), but the highlight throw was a beautiful deep shot to receiver Van Jefferson, placing the ball accurately between three defenders. Jefferson dropped the pass. Ward said after the game that he needed to put that ball more on Jefferson’s chest than to force the receiver to stretch for the ball.

Ward is playing all the right notes. What he wants in return is continuity from the organization around him.

“You see it with the best quarterbacks out there — Tom Brady, he had stability,” Ward said. “Lamar [Jackson], he had stability, Pat [Mahomes], he had stability. I think a lot of guys who have stability in the NFL can succeed long term.”